Tableau Software Becomes a Member of Emerging Splunk Ecosystem

As a platform for indexing and analyzing machine data, Splunk has emerged as a provider of a Big Data platform that developers can easily invoke. Now Splunk is starting to build an ecosystem around that platform.

Ted Wasserman, a member of the product management team at Tableau, says that end users of the company’s application can now pull Splunk data into the Tableau in-memory engine or launch a query directly against data residing in Splunk. This hybrid query approach, says Wasserman, gives organizations the flexibility they need to work with unstructured machine data that can be quite large.

The alliance with Tableau, says Tapan Bhatt, vice president of business analytics for Splunk, will make it easier for organizations to correlate other sources of data with the machine data that Splunk collects to more easily identify a trend line. As valuable as machine data is, it’s usually only when that information is compared with other sources of data that the real significance of all that machine data becomes apparent.

In an effort to make that easier to accomplish, Splunk recently made available updates to the Splunk SDK for Python and released a Splunk Plug-in for Eclipse to help developers build applications based on Splunk Enterprise. Splunk also makes SDKs available for Java, JavaScript, Ruby C#, and PHP.

The alliance with Splunk, says Wasserman -- part of a general movement to create data-driven analytics applicaitons -- is intended to make it easier for businesses to make sense of Big Data so that they can make more informed decisions. Increasingly, that means creating applications that take advantage of APIs and connectors to access multiple sources of Big Data in a way that makes it simpler to apply analytics against multiple sources of data.